Australia’s Parliament House. Photo Credit: Thennicke
Australia’s Parliament has passed the Copyright Amendment Bill 2026, thereby setting the stage for loosened “orphan works” restrictions and an expanded educational licensing framework covering online learning.
Technically, the bill’s approval in both the House and the Senate became official yesterday. And rights organizations including AMPAL, ARIA PPCA, APRA AMCOS and the Australian Writers’ Guild welcomed the legislation’s passage in a joint statement today.
Focusing on the Copyright Amendment Bill itself for a moment, the measure, in keeping with its name, lays out multiple modifications to Australia’s Copyright Act 1968. First, there are now clear-cut infringement-relief limitations in place for the initially mentioned orphan works – meaning any work whose “copyright owner cannot be identified or located.”
As spelled out in the text, courts cannot award “damages or an account of profits” for the alleged infringement of orphan works, but can compel defendants to cough up “reasonable payment to the copyright owner or owners in respect of the infringing use.”
Furthermore, if “the use was solely for private and domestic use” and “promptly ceased” or set the stage for some sort of licensing agreement, even this “reasonable payment” would be off the table.
Meanwhile, all these protections are contingent upon the defendant’s performing a “reasonably diligent search for the owner or owners of copyright” prior to the allegedly infringing use.
In the view of APRA AMCOS – plus the National Association for the Visual Arts and Screenrights, the Copyright Agency, and others – the implementation “of Australia’s first orphan works scheme provides certainty with materials where copyright owners cannot be identified or located, benefiting researchers, educators, cultural institutions and the broader community.”
Shifting to the remote-learning side, the relevant Copyright Amendment Bill section bolsters the existing in-person licensing model to also cover classroom settings involving “technology that allows a person to take part in all or part of the educational instruction without being physically present.”
(A quick detour to the classroom licensing exception as described in the Copyright Act 1968: Protected works performed “in the course of educational instruction” shall “be deemed not to be a performance in public if the audience is limited to persons who are taking part in the instruction.”)
“For just under $30 per student per year,” APRA AMCOS and others weighed in, “every student in every Australian school has access to everything ever created. Every book ever written, virtually every song ever recorded, every image ever published, every article, every poem, every illustration, every play, every documentary or film ever made and every screenplay.
“The education sector spends more on cleaning schools than it pays to access the entirety of human creative output. This is a scheme that works for students, for teachers and for creators. It is the product of decades of good faith negotiation and it should be protected, not eroded,” the organizations continued.
